Douglas Florian is the creator of many celebrated picture books, including Poetrees; Dinothesaurus, which received four starred reviews; Comets, Stars, the Moon, and Mars, a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year and Horn Book Fanfare List selection; and Bow Wow Meow Meow, winner of the Gryphon Award and a Parents Magazine Best Book of the Year. He lives with his family in New York.
"Florian (Poetrees, 2010, etc.) bestows yet another pleasing mix of
punny poems and colorful collages that blend whimsy and fact....
Spreads like "Swarm" epitomize Florian's skill at combining pithy
rhymes, well-chosen facts and playfully tongue-in-cheek
pictures.... Design is crisp.... Florian shines again here."
--Kirkus Reviews, March 6, 2012
"In this high-spirited and lyrical homage to bees, smudgy paintings
that resemble a child's chalkboard drawings pair with collage
elements to tenderly anthropomorphize the insects.... Florian also
includes descriptions of bee behavior ("One of bees' most important
roles in nature is a process called pollination"), which add a
touch of biology to his tableaus." --Publishers Weekly, February
27, 2012
"Working in gouache, colored pencils, and collage on paper bags,
Florian evokes the world of bees with repetitive patterning that
cleverly references their honeycombs and the fields of flowers they
frequent as well as the bees themselves--worker bees are sisters
hatched from eggs laid two thousand at a crack. His rhythmic verse,
too, echoes bee behavior, as much with sound as with sense ("I'm a
nectar collector. / Make wax to the max. / A beehive protector. / I
never relax"). Puns and other wordplay enliven the text ("Why are
we full / Of fuzz and fuzz? / Bee-cuzz bee-cuzz / The fuzz the fuzz
/ Helps pollen stick / To uzz to uzz"). A paragraph of more
straightforward facts elucidates each spread, but the real energy
here is in the deceptively casual art. A regal queen bee looks
almost human, and drones resemble feckless kids, while captions of
discretely scattered capitals provide as much texture as
information...an offbeat and attractive book, completed with a
"BEEbliography." --The Horn Book, March/April 2012
"Another winning compendium.... Cheerful anthropomorphized
caricatures of honeybees accompany upbeat, rhyming wordplay and
factual notes in the artist's familiar style.... "All day we
bees/Just buzz and buzz./That's what we duzz/And duzz and duzz."
The book is just what Florian duzz and will be welcomed by his
fans." --School Library Journal, February 2012
"Poetic chronicler of the natural world Florian takes on a more
tightly focused subject than usual, winging his way through the
world of the honeybee in fourteen rhyming poems...a bee brags of
being her "own pollen nation" in "Summer Hummer," while the
onomatopoeic "Bees Buzz" will have kids bzzing their way through
the day. A bibliography--sorry, "BEEbliography"--and a couple of
web links for further reading are included." --Bulletin of the
Center for Children's Books, March 2012
"The latest in Florian's series of poetry books spotlighting
animals, this attractive volume features bees.... Here the facts
appear alongside the verse, an arrangement that works well because
knowledge enlarges the experience of reading the verse and helps
the information stick...some of the rhyming poems...express the
bees' point of view in a playful way that makes them fun to read
aloud or even to memorize.... A nice mix of wordplay and science."
--Booklist, April 1, 2012
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